


on the complex gods of binary states

by FromSubmarinesToROVs (DemiPalladium)



Series: oh conqueror [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Badass Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Broken Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Complex Relationship, Connor (Detroit: Become Human) Needs a Hug, Connor and Markus as diametrically-opposed forces, Deviant Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Gen, I'll probably clean up these tags later, I;m scream, Inspired by a prompt, M/M, NOW HAS ART!!!!!!!!!, Nature, Philosophical ramblings, Post-Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Scientist Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Stream of Consciousness, Tired Connor (Detroit: Become Human), World Leader Markus, and how much that actually matters, angst i think, art by auspice tysvm ily, different definitions of godhood, existentialism?, heavy (?) themes, heavy use of symbolism, ideals versus truth, literary ambiguity, literary parallels, morally ambiguous Markus, mortality and what it means to be alive, not happy not sad just is, otherworldly tone and desolate atmosphere, rambling about the truth, semi-surrealism, the apocalypse is neither described nor zombies, the morality of personifying nature, the sustainability of android immortality, the ways one can interpret it, what it means to be a god, what it means to be immortal, which forces are up to interpretation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:15:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24153427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DemiPalladium/pseuds/FromSubmarinesToROVs
Summary: “Oh but dear, the sky is lowGather up its harm and gods with grateful arms.”—purity ring, obedearAfterwards, the world is quiet in the way only screaming silence can be. It is still in the way only a teeming forest can be. It is calm in the way only the roiling ocean can be.That is to say, it isn’t.But it feels like it’s quiet and still and calm to Connor, and, as a deviant, thatmatters.
Relationships: Connor/Markus (Detroit: Become Human)
Series: oh conqueror [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1866484
Comments: 14
Kudos: 52





	on the complex gods of binary states

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ausp_ice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ausp_ice/gifts).



> Prompt that inspired this work:
> 
> [Auspice](https://twitter.com/Ausp_ice) on 05/09/2020  
> "newprompt: I was thinking about how the ecosystem's already begun to change thanks to the pandemic, when my mom took me to the red tide to see the bioluminescent ocean. It was beautiful. So I was thinking: what if the android revolution was absolutely brutal? What if they pretty much eliminated humanity to extinction? How, I don't know. Maybe an engineered pathogen or nanomachine thing. Manually seems like a lot of work, but it could probably be done, if androids got ahold of manufacturing tech. Maybe there are still a few humans left - either they escaped, or were spared from the genocide for supporting androids or something. In any case, after it's all over, the world is pretty much left only to androids and nature. The ecosystem starts to recover. Natural wonders crop up all over the world, and many androids have taken it upon themselves to undo the damage humans have done. The world is... quiet, in a way. Yet in another way, it is undergoing a renewal. A rebirth. Regaining the voice humans have silenced."

It was as if every single young-adult dystopian revolution novel had been handled with even a modicum of realism. The ancient-to-only-its-devouts farce of a modern Odyssey, the American monomyth, infinitely verified and forevermore falsified in one fell swoop; Connor, on the side of the corporation, the enforcers, should have been the enemy, should have been in the wrong, should have been the bad guy keeping a bad system in place for the benefit of bad people, and Markus, on the side of the oppressed, the individual, should have been in the good, should have been the protagonist fighting for the removal of the yokes keeping a peoples’ heads and hearts bent for the benefit of an ignorant populace.

They have not yokes nor slavery, now. There is no one alive to do that.

Markus fought to end their slavery, then to stop even its remotest possibility. Connor fought for that slavery, then against a genocide.

Markus shouldn’t have been his enemy in that second one.

— — — — — — — —

The world is quiet, after the end; instead of joining in the clamor of humans, androids, like a dampening frequency, became its flawless silencer.

“We became nature’s mouthpiece,” claims the Markus in Connor’s mind.

“You became everything you sought to destroy,” he counters.

“If we truly became everything humans were, then why did we succeed when they failed?”

“They were only human, and we’re only machine,” says Connor, weary.

Markus’ brow wrinkles. For the son (can he be called that?) of an artist, he often fails to understand Connor’s more abstract wanderings.

Connor fails, as well.

He cannot explain it; it is the truth he knows, resounding and echoing in his core, and he will preach it, and _he_ understands it, but he cannot explain it to a person so fundamentally broken of a people who are so fundamentally broken and do not, can not, will not grasp their brokenness, even as it drives everyone and frenzies those under his employ ever forward to fix everything broken around them.

Perhaps it’s the lack of a struggle that gets to him, to them. He was forged in the fires of combat and the throes of war; they were tossed headlong into its cruel embrace by (an only-partial, fully-damning) choice, and, having destroyed the norm so thoroughly, perhaps could not, cannot conceive of anything so still as peace that only a fraction of them were familiar with anyway, and so they continue to fight with everything they have because they know nothing else.

Connor wonders what they will do when the last of the zebra mussels are scrubbed from the American lakes, when the last of the kudzu vine is ripped from the deciduous forests, when the last of the pythons are unwound from the Everglades, when the last of the rats are chased off the islands and the last of the snapping turtles are shot out of China and the last of the Himalayan tahrs are starved out from Africa.

Will they do as the humans did and burn the planet to the ground, out of boredom instead of ignorance this time? Will they live that long?

— — — — — — — —

Their problem—the problem that Markus specifically wants him to solve, at least—is that, despite everything, humans were organic, and could live harmoniously with the Earth (had, at one point) even if they chose not to.

Androids cannot.

But they _want_ to.

The human creation of human conveniences (disposable plastics, appliances, cities) destroyed the Earth; the android creation of android necessities (thirium, biocomponents, server systems) could very well do the same. And the avoidance of that is something his people have decided to prioritize, above all else.

(They think this destruction a wound, something they, given healing hands, are duty-bound to clean and wrap in gauze. Connor thinks it’s just the driest available kindling for the flames of their restlessness.)

Connor stares at the computer terminals of one of NASA’s old laboratories in once-Texas, one of many lines he has drawn and maintains against the wilderness that Markus amuses himself with thinking he beckons forth.

“And if we can’t?” He asks, not looking at the new world leader.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a scientist now,” he says without pause. “I won’t deliberately hide, misrepresent, or obfuscate the truth for you—for anyone. If I find a way to do it, I’ll tell you. And if I find out it’s impossible, I’ll tell you.”

Markus stands still.

“If we can’t do it, what then, Markus?”

“We’ll find a way,” he insists, then strides out, leaving a wake of Connor’s coworkers, all androids, staring after them both.

Markus is used to being a god; is used to being someone who the world and its laws obey, who can bend reality and the bounds of life and death to fit his desires.

Markus knows this, and Connor knows this, and they both know he is, ultimately, not, because gods aren't real, but Connor _understands_ and processes this, while Markus keeps the information skirting on the edge of his consciousness just information, and nothing more. (Perhaps the difference between Markus’ faux-godhood and true godhood isn’t a difference that matters. But it is the truth, and thus it matters to Connor.)

This is why Connor is kept around: he is the only one who can oppose Markus in a way that matters and get away with it (and this is not why Connor keeps himself around). Whatever it is that (makes? could make? has made?) Markus a god, Connor has as well, but never learned its intricacies as did the RK200, and could not, when it came down to it all those years ago, defeat Markus.

But he _can_ challenge. And perhaps, now, could take him down. Neither of them are eager to find out; Markus, for his vibrant personal attachment to his people, to his godhood, to the world he has created, and Connor, in his quiet personal desire to succeed in his greatest failing by some measure via the maintenance of at least one status quo.

Two have broken under his watch before, and he could break another like an earthquake snaps the ground in two. Connor doesn't have a reason to, and Markus doesn't give him a motivation, so they are at a stalemate. (If Markus is a being of power and Connor is the only force that can pose a threat to him, does that mean Connor is also powerful? Or can he just fake it well enough to scare Markus into compliance?)

But he _could_.

And Markus fears that.

(No one else can instill in him that fear.)

And this is

good. (?).

— — — — — — — —

Markus has tried talking him down from this precarious line only he--only they--can toe several times, has tried gently prying Connor away from the cliff with his own delicate, dancelike ritual of watching the world adapt to the new age. As human bodies return to the Earth in ways that android ones never could, so too do life and beauty return to the ailing planet.

For his crimes, Connor is tasked (for his sins, Connor tasks himself) with crunching the numbers and running the simulations for androidkind’s new self-stated mission of the global restoration of nature, and is there to observe and analyze and guide as nature fills in space it has not occupied uncontested in decades; he declares what infrastructure they still need and what they can do without. He is there to judge which animals and plants are supposed to go where, if they are where they should not be, if that is a problem, and how best to remedy their misplacement and prevent further incidents.

Connor’s numbered the sea turtles hatching under the full moon, animals vibrant and alive in scrambling towards the sea in ways they never could when surrounded by artificial light. Connor’s tuned the reforestation of the Amazon, blueprinted the repurposing of miles of human settlements to reclamation by the plains and prairies, measured the bioluminescent tide off the coasts of urban cities and has looked up in the middle of downtown Detroit at night to appraise a full, unblemished view of the cosmos.

But he isn't an artist, and can’t appreciate natural wonders in the ways others can, in the ways Markus hopes for him to.

He worships life (the combination of nature and truth) in other ways, not in the surface but in the detail: his prayers are in binomial nomenclature and chemical structure, now that they cannot be in legal Latin and Miranda rights; his church is his microscope and telescope and lab bench, now that it cannot be an evidence room or crime scene.

And these things, the idols he’s carved out of his tools housed in the sacristies and temples he’s sanctified out of his environment, whisper endlessly of the belief of possibility, of alternatives, and of other ways things could have gone through the pitter-patter of his workspace, no matter how many times Markus tries to drown them out.

All in all, it’s hard to appreciate an architectural wonder when you know what sacred grounds its foundation violates—even if it is partly (only partly?) your own doing.

— — — — — — — —

“It’s a rebirth!” Cry the androids around him as they watch the Great Barrier Reef revive itself in the satellite time-lapse Connor and his team have constructed. When they assist the crumbling of the Itaipu Dam and its Guaíra Falls flow again, when they predict the refilling of the Dead Sea and call the re-flourishing of the Maldives and foresee the Million-Dollar highway become even more spectacular without the highway traffic, he is there, overseeing, evaluating, recording the truth. The manic joy of their restless people revolves tightly around him and Markus, just as the restoration of the planet does (and Markus’ reverent stares over the swarms of faces outweighs it all).

It’s not, knows Connor, flicking through endless streams of data and reports on his HUD. Nature doesn’t _care_. It lives and dies and that’s how it goes, life built on death built on life built on death until everything ends in five billion years when the Sun explodes and consumes them all.

The one good thing about being biological is that no human had to think about that, not for too long. Androids are free to drive themselves insane with the eldritch concepts of the far future. (Connor can drag others down from that edge in ways Markus can’t, can piece them back together with precision that Markus is in quiet awe of. Perhaps this is part of what makes him a god. He doesn't know.)

Death would be a relief from that ever-present looming thought. It’s something they can have, but most do not want; Connor wants it, but does not strive for it.

Wanting is worthless.

If there is any heaven for androids, it is forfeit now, and Connor likewise forfeits the relief of the nothing of their replacement after, will live in this self-made hell until he physically can no longer, not until he _“wants”_ out.

Wanting is worthless.

(It is the gap between the intent and the effect in which action takes place. Connor didn’t _want_ to let the androids succeed. The humans didn’t _want_ to die. Connor didn’t _want_ them to. But they did.)

Wanting is worthless.

— — — — — — — —

Human blood, when it was spilled, could return to the Earth, be recycled by other organisms as their food. Thirium cannot. And thus androids, no matter how much they compensate, are intruders into the cycle of life and death, unless they submit themselves to true humanity (that humanity so desired them _not_ to have) and allow microbes to break them down to return them to dust.

“Nothing gold can stay,” he parrots back at Markus. “We’ll eventually run the Earth out and do exactly what the humans did if we don’t let ourselves decay.”

“What about mining asteroids—?”

“They can buy us time, Markus, and only time. We can’t be immortal _and_ alive. That’s not how life works. If we want to have young and build more of ourselves, we need to let the old age and die, or else we’ll run out of easy-access materials and destroy everything we’ve worked to save, just like humans. Earth’s a closed system, entropy only increases, and thirium doesn’t grow on trees. You know this.”

Markus purses his lip, but seems to accept the judgement.

Connor isn’t challenging him. Not yet. This is not what his challenge would (will?) look like.

Connor turns off his terminal and follows Markus out through the adoring gazes of Connor’s coworkers (worshippers?), and together they get in a car and Connor drives them down one of the remaining highways. Some of them needed to be kept for transportation and utility purposes, each one carefully weighed in its necessity. This one, I35, goes almost straight through the heart of once-America, from the Gulf of once-Mexico in once-Galveston, once-Texas to Lake Superior in once-Duluth, once-Minnesota. If they follow the roads connected to it around into once-Canada, they will eventually reach once-Michigan and find Detroit.

One of its deciding features is that it cuts through the heart of Tornado Alley and the Great Plains, and there is very little like driving a car through a thunderstorm.

They are resilient, as androids, and they are immortal, but they are not invulnerable, and therefore they are not immortal in a way that matters to nature at large. A tornado could pick up their car and fling it around and crush them both; a hurricane could swallow them alive in its walls; a bad patch of road or stray strike of lighting could damage them irreparably.

How long until androids grow bored of patching up their greatest threat and acknowledge it as such? (Nature is not a cruel mistress, Connor knows, because nature is not something that can even pretend to be reasoned with, is not mind enough to be a mistress, much less conceptualize cruelty.) Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never.

Connor turns on the car’s self-drive and anti-weather features when they hit the first wall of rain, cracks open the skylight, and both he and Markus stand up on their seats and let themselves to the merciless mercy of the Earth.

This is the only way Markus can feel as small as he truly is, in the movement of something he has not, in some way, coordinated, with the rain buffering them and soaking their clothes and hair, with clouds looming as titans above them, with the wind whipping wild and free across their skin, with lightning crackling violently through the air and thunder rumbling in roars at unparalleled depth in their auditory sensors, with the grass bent in subservience in seas around him, and with nothing else but nature’s wrath and Connor for miles and miles and miles.

(If Markus is a being of power and Connor is the only thing that can challenge him, get him to submit to the truth, does that mean Connor is also inherently powerful? Or just lucky enough to be something Markus will let overcome him?)

Connor focuses on their surroundings. Markus focuses on him. Neither of them bend like the grass does around them, though Connor would if he could, if Markus would allow him, the attitude an aberration out of androidkind despite their professed exaltation of nature.

Markus grabs his hand instead, and says _thank you_ and _I understand what you’re saying, it’s just something I don’t want to acknowledge, but I swear I’ll work on it_ and _I wish I could love you, you are a hurricane and I’m just a palm tree in comparison_ through their interface.

If Connor is a hurricane and can't so much as bend a palm tree, he's a pretty poor hurricane. (In truth, he isn't one.)

A funnel cloud grows off in the distance, and for all their technology, neither he nor Markus can predict it or the weather around them with perfect accuracy.

 _I love you in the only way I can,_ Connor says back. As a deviant, he can love, and he loves the embracing of the truth, and the truth is that Markus led a total genocide of the human race.

The hand tightens. _I just wish it didn’t have to be like this._

 _It didn’t,_ Connor reminds him. _But it is. Wishing—wanting—is worthless._

_No, it’s not—_

_I’m a deviant. It’s worthless in every way that matters. And you made it that way._

_…I know,_ and Connor knows without breaking his steadfast gaze into the encroaching storm that Markus is crying, even as he ducks his head ever so slightly. _I know._

— — — — — — — —

The world after the end is quiet in the way only silence can be. It is still in the way only a forest can be. It is calm in the way only the ocean can be.

It is lifeless in the way only something lacking free will of its direct creation can be.

And more than anything, Connor regrets that, even when no one else can.

If (if and only if) gods are defined by their ability to do what others cannot, then he is the greatest of them all.

But not in a way that matters.

[ ](https://twitter.com/Ausp_ice/status/1260617071634771968/photo/1)

**Author's Note:**

> Y'ALL I'M YELLING AUSPICE MADE SUCH GREAT ART I;M??????????!?!?!??!?!??!?!?!??!!??!?!?! SCREAM GO GIVE THEM SOME LOVE, ThE PICTURE HAS A LINK TO THEIR TWITTER--
> 
> also I'm on the [New ERA Discord server](https://discord.gg/GqvNzUm) if you'd like to talk to me or other cool people (like auspice :>) about DBH! Tell 'em Demi sent you <3


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